Thanksgiving!

Happy first day of December! These months have been going by so fast! Last week was pretty exciting and thankfully my weekend was very relaxing to make up for it. The beginning of the week was spent getting ready for Thanksgiving. I cleaned my apartment and even cleaned my closets (which they really needed after all my shopping two weeks ago). I was preparing the food for Thursday and making sure everyone else knew what they could bring to help. It was a lot of hard work, especially in my little kitchen with a borrowed oven, but it was well worth it!

On Thursday I was running around crazy making sure everything was ready. It was a beautiful day and I was very anxious to leave school to finish preparing. I got to work right away finished up my cleaning. I had just started cooking the vegetables and sausage for the stuffing when Patrick showed up with a bottle of wine and helped me finish the preparations. My friend Dave had cooked the turkey for me the previous day (my borrowed oven was too small to fit it) and I had picked it up the day before. So when all was said and done I had made cranberry sauce, apple cranberry sauce, gravy, stuffing, and green beans with almonds. Leah brought a salad and Caol brought mashed potatoes. I heated up the turkey that Dave had cooked and got pumpkin pie and ice cream for dessert. It was a great meal! Thirteen people ended up coming over for dinner around 7:00. That meant that there were fourteen people in my tiny apartment including me. Thankfully it was less of a squeeze than I had originally thought it would be and I'm just so happy I invested in a small table and two chairs for my balcony. Everyone had a great time and it was even better than last year! The last few people left around 11:00 and a huge thank you to Bec who did many of the dishes before leaving. I do miss my family around the holidays, but it was an amazing Thanksgiving with the people in Japan who have become a second family to me.

In true American fashion, the day after Thanksgiving I was doing Christmas things. My classes at Shinozaki are making Christmas cards that we will send to the children at St. Jude Children's Hospital. We have to start early so that the students have time to work and there is time for the cards to get back to America. I did this activity last year with Futajima and they liked it so much they are doing it again with Juha, their ALT this year. The students are really enjoying it and there have been some great cards made already!

As fun as it was making Christmas cards with the students, I was glad when the school day was over. I was still tired from Thursday. I had a quite night of eating leftovers and Patrick came over to watch a movie. We saw Edge of Tomorrow and although neither of us knew much about it before hand, we both really enjoyed it. Saturday again was quite. I stayed home most of the day and we out to meet Marc, Tanya, and their friend Dan for dinner. We ended up getting 食べ放題 (tabehoudai, all you can eat) 焼肉 (yakiniku, grilled meats). It was really nice to see them and I got some errands done. Sunday I stayed in all day. I was going to meet Megan and go into Fukuoka, but she was feeling a little sick and the weather was terrible. It's been a great week!